Lars Scharff

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Primary fields of research

Plant cells possess three compartments with their own ribosomes: the cytosol and two bacteria-derived organelles, mitochondria and plastids. In plastids up to 50% of all proteins in plant leaves are produced. Plastid gene expression has some unique features. In contrast to bacterial and nuclear gene expression, in plastids translation is one of the major regulatory levels of gene expression. The translation machinery in plastids is a mosaic made of strongly conserved bacterial features and fast evolving eukaryotic factors. My main interest is to decipher the mechanisms determining translation initiation and elongation as well their regulation in plastids. We use different omics methods to measure translation and characterise the translation machinery to reach this aim. Our goal is to engineer regulatory elements to be able to fine-tune and optimise protein synthesis.